Three Lovecraft stories share a frame in Necronomicon, each segment handed to a different director and, mostly, a different effects shop. Tom Savini sat over the whole production as special makeup effects consultant, but the creature work itself was split: Christophe Gans’ “The Drowned” went to Todd Masters and MastersFX, Shusuke Kaneko’s “The Cold” went to Christopher Nelson, and the two segments directed by Brian Yuzna — the framing story and “Whispers” — went to George, credited as creature technical director. That’s the extent of his contribution. The seaweed things and the giant squid deity in Gans’ segment are not his; neither is the melting-skin work in Kaneko’s.
In the wraparound, Jeffrey Combs plays H.P. Lovecraft breaking into a monastery vault to copy the Necronomicon itself. George’s studio built the thing that stops him: a slimy, tentacled guardian with a body that appears to pulse as it attacks in a flooding set. The available sources do not document its materials or operating rig. In “Whispers,” a pregnant police officer is hunted through a cavern by a family of immortal parasites. George based them on Lovecraft’s Mi-Go: bat wings, eyeless insectoid heads and a second mouth set into the belly. As in the shunting from Society four years earlier, the design rearranges recognizable anatomy until the body becomes hard to read. This time the starting point came from Lovecraft rather than George himself.